FINISHED:
Schmidt, Gary D. (2011). Okay for now. New York: Clarion/Houghton Mifflin.

[After his abusive father is fired from his job, Doug Swieteck and his family are uprooted and replanted to a small, rural town in upstate New York. Doug gets a job making deliveries for a local market owned by the father of a cute girl from school, and follows the girl into the town library. Here, Doug discovers an old John James Audubon book of bird drawings which inspire him to refine his own drawing, and launch a search to recover some of the missing pages. (Each chapter title is that of a bird found in Audubon’s book, with the accompanying illustration included for reference.) In this companion novel to his own The Wednesday Wars (Clarion, 2007), Schmidt has made Doug a good, well-intentioned kid with whom the reader can immediately sympathize and root for. Doug’s library and drawing excursions show the transportative and transformative power of art and the written word/knowledge, and, most importantly, become a ticket of escape and a way to a better future for Doug. Loaded with humor, quirky characters and some sadness (the scenes involving Doug’s oldest brother returning from a tour in the Vietnam War are particularly striking), Okay For Now is a masterstroke for Schmidt in an already glowing body of work. [Reviewed from ARC.]]

STARTED:
Glass, Linzi. (2010). Finding Danny. New York: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins.

[Reviewing for SFPL...]

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